


The Brilliant Bakugo (The Great Gatsby)

by Lilabethwritescrap



Category: Great Gatsby - F. Scott Fitzgerald, 僕のヒーローアカデミア | Boku no Hero Academia | My Hero Academia
Genre: Alternate Universe, Character Study, F/F, F/M, Gay as hell, I am sorry in advance, I can and will make Gatsby and Nick have sex, M/M, Multi, Out of Character, The Great Gatsby References, The Great Gatsby is gay and Kiri is gay coded so why the fuck not, Will update weekly until the book is transfered, you can’t stop me
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2021-01-05
Updated: 2021-01-07
Packaged: 2021-03-15 19:21:22
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 2
Words: 10,759
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28569171
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Lilabethwritescrap/pseuds/Lilabethwritescrap
Summary: I know.  It became public domain so I decided to rework the book into a My Hero Academia ff.  I will say that not all of these are in character but I am trying really hard to rework the story into the book.  This is just the first chapter.The Great Gatsby but Bakugo is Gatsby
Relationships: Ashido Mina/Kirishima Eijirou, Bakugou Katsuki/Kirishima Eijirou, Bakugou Katsuki/Uraraka Ochako, Iida Tenya/Midoriya Izuku, Midoriya Izuku/Todoroki Shouto, Todoroki Shouto/Uraraka Ochako
Kudos: 1





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Story belonging to F. Scott Fitzgerald.
> 
> I really just changed names and like a couple words to fit My Hero Academia better. They are still heroes sort of. I tried to cut the racism out. This book is like, incredibly racist. Why didn’t my hs English teacher let me know that when I read it on sparknotes?

In my younger and more vulnerable years I got advice from a personal hero of mind that has been running through my mind since.  
“Whenever you feel like criticizing anyone,” he had said, “just remember that all the people in this world haven’t had the advantages that you’ve had.”  
The Crimson Riot said little more about quirk privilege since he was mainly placed as a show of strength, but I understood that he meant a great deal in those words. In consequence I’m inclined to reserve all judgments, a habit that has opened up many curious natures and harmed me more than a few times as well. The abnormal mind detects and attaches itself quickly to this quality when it appears in an ordinary person. In hero school I was often and unjustly accused of playing a politician, something a hero should never be, but only because I was empathetic to the secret griefs of those manly unknown men. Most of these hero students confided in me without my explicit consent. I faked being asleep more than once when I felt an intimate revelation blossoming on the horizon for the intimate revelations of young men or at least the terms in which they express them are usually plagiarists and marred by obvious suppressions. Reserving judgments is a matter of infinite hope. I am still a little afraid of missing something if I forget that, as the Crimson Riot once snobbish you suggested, and I snobbishly repeat a sense of the fundamental decencies is parceled out unequally at birth.

And, after boasting this way of my tolerance, I come to the admission that it has a limit. Conduct may be founded on the hard rock or the wet marshes but after a certain point I don’t care what it’s founded on. When I came back from my internship last autumn I felt that I wanted the world to be in a uniform and at a sort of moral attention forever; I wanted no more Riotous excursions with privileged glimpses into the human heart. Only Bakugo, the man who gives his name to this story, was exempt from my reaction—Bakugo who represented everything which I have unaffected scorn. If personality is an unbroken series of successful gestures, then there was something gorgeous about him, some heightened sensitivity to the promises of life, as if he were related to the intricate seismograph that charts earthquakes from miles away. Earthquakes he could create with his explosive quirk and explosive personality. This responsiveness had nothing to do with that subpar impression ability which was only justified as a “heroic temperament”—it was and extraordinary gift for power and hope, an almost romantic readiness such as I have never found in any other hero and is not likely I shall ever find again. No—Bakugo turned out all right at the end; it is what preyed on Bakugo, what foul dust floated in the wake of his dreams that temporarily closed on my interest in the abortive sorrows and short winded elations of men.  
My hero classmates have been prominent, well off people in the middle of the high class area of the city for generations. The Todoroki’s are something of a clan and are descended from the great heroes including Enji Todoroki, commonly known as Endeavor with the quirk of Hellfire. According to my good friend and schoolmate Shoto, the Kirishima’s and the Todoroki’s are distantly related and I even look like Todoroki’s great-uncle. I’ve seen a picture of him, a rather hard-boiled painting that hung in Endeavor’s office. I saw it once while visiting Shoto’s family home during Christmas break. I graduated from University of Academics a quarter of a century after my father, and a little later I participated in that delayed fight with the power hungry villain All For One. I am still unsure what happened during that fight as I was quickly disabled and injured so much so that after I retired and moved away from my original patrol I was restless. Instead of being the warm center of the world I had once known, it felt like the ragged edge of the universe I was too small to take down—so I decided to move east and learn the management business. Everybody I knew was in hero management or was a hero being managed so I supposed it could support one more single man. All my aunts and uncles talked it over as if they were choosing a hero school for me again and finally said, “Why—yes” with very confused and hesitant faces. My father agreed to finance me for a year and after various delays I came east, permanently, I thought. The practical thing was to find rooms in the city but it was a warm season and I had just left a country of wide lawns and friendly trees, so when a young man at the office suggested that we take a house together in a commuting town it sounded like a great idea. He found the house, a weather beaten cardboard bungalow at eighty a month, but at the last minute the firm ordered him to the United States and I went out to the country alone. It was disappointing. He was attractive. Monoma I think his name was. It’s been so long and I never saw him again. I had a dog, at least I had him for a few days until he ran away. Maybe the dog was named Monoma. If it was the man then I am gravely apologetic. 

I had a beat down touch and there was a Finnish woman who made my bed and cooked breakfast and muttered Finnish wisdom to herself over the electric stove. I do wish I had learned Finnish rather than German in my younger years.  
It was lonely for a day or so until one morning some man, more recently arrived than I, stopped me on the road asking for directions to the West end of the neighborhood. I told him. And as I walked on I was lonely no longer. I was a guide, a path finder, an original settler. He had casually conferred on me the. Freedom of the neighborhood. And so with the sunshine and the great bursts of leaves growing on the trees-just as things grow in nature documentaries- I had that familiar conviction that life was beginning over again with the summer.  
There was so much to read for one thing and so much fine health to be pulled down out of the young breath giving air. I bought a dozen volumes on hero agencies and investments and they stood on my shelf in red and gold like new money from the mint, promising to unfold the shining secrets that only Midas and Morgan and Maecenas knew. And I had the high intention of reading many other books besides. I was rather literary in college however mathematics was not my strong suit. I studied often and even wrote a series of editorials for the ‘UA News’— and now I was going to bring back such things into my life and become again that most limited of all specialists, the “well-rounded man.” This isn’t just an epigram—lif is much more successfully looked at from a single window, after all.

It was a matter of chance that I should have rented a house in one of the strangest communities in Japan. Let’s pretend for story sake that there were two abnormal land malformations. A terraforming villain from the beginning of quirks had created then as a safe haven away from hero society. Twenty miles from the city a pair of enormous eggs, identical in contour and separated only by a courtesy bay, jut out into the most domesticated body of salt water. They are not perfect ovals—like the egg in the Columbus story they are both crushed flat at the contact end—but their physical resemblance must be a source of perpetual confusion to the gulls that fly overhead. To the wingless a more arresting phenomenon is their dissimilarity in every particular except shape and size.  
I lived at West Egg, the—well, the less fashionable of the two, though this is a most superficial tag to express the bizarre and not a little sinister contrast between them. My house was at the very tip of the egg, only fifty yards from the Sound, and squeezed between two huge places that rented for twelve or fifteen hundred thousand a season. The one on my right was a colossal affair by any standard—it was a factual imitation of some Hôtel de Ville in Normandy, with a tower on one side, spanking new under a thin beard of raw ivy, and a marble swimming pool and more than forty acres of lawn and garden. It was Bakugo’s mansion. Or rather, as I didn’t know Mr. Bakugo, it was a mansion inhabited by a gentleman of that name. My own house was an eye-sore, but it was a small eye-sore, and it had been overlooked, so I had a view of the water, a partial view of my neighbor’s lawn, and the consoling proximity of millionaires—all for eighty dol- lars a month.  
Across the courtesy bay the white palaces of fashionable East Egg glittered along the water, and the history of the summer really begins on the evening I drove over there to have dinner with the Todorokis. Uraraka was my dearest friend from hero school and I had been on patrol with Shoto. I spent many vacations with them while I was still a full time working hero. Her husband, among various physical accomplishments, had been one of the most powerful heroes to grace Japan—a nationally ranked figure and one of those meant who reach such an acute limited excellence at twenty-one that everything afterward savors of anti-climax. His family were enormously wealthy—even during internets and sidekick stints his freedom with money was a matter for reproach—but now he’d left heroics and come east in a fashion that rather took your breath away: for instance he’d brought down a string of polo ponies from Lake Forest. It was hard to realize that a man in my own generation, a hero like me even was wealthy enough to do that. There was also no real reason to do this because although polo ponies were a great photo for the wealth he had accumulated, he did not play polo. He had insisted that there was no equivalent for heroes so the polo ponies remained. I’ve never seen him ride one.  
Why they came east I don’t know. They had spent a year in France, for no particular reason, and then drifted here and there unrestfully wherever people ranked heroes and were rich together. This was a permanent move, said Uraraka over the telephone, but I didn’t believe it—I had no sight into Ochako’s heart but I felt that Shoto would drift on forever seeking a little wistfully for the dramatic turbulence of some irrecoverable mission.

And so it happened that on a warm windy evening I drove over to East Egg to see two old friends whom I scarcely knew at all at this point. Their house was even more elaborate than I expected, a cheerful red and white mansion overlooking the bay. The lawn started at the beach and ran toward the front door for a quarter of a mile, jumping over sun-dials and brick walks and burning gardens—finally when it reached the house drifting up the side in bright vines as though from the momentum of its run. The front was broken by a line of French windows, glowing now with reflected gold, and wide open to the warm windy afternoon, and Shoto Todoroki in pristine nubile riding clothes was standing with his legs apart on the front porch.  
He had changed since his UA years. Now he was a sturdy, straw haired man of thirty with a rather hard mouth and a supercilious manner. Two mismatched, shining, and unfortunately arrogant eyes had established dominance over his face and gave him the appearance of always leaning aggressively forward. Not even the effeminate swank of his riding clothes could hide the enormous power of that body—he seemed to fill those glistening boots until he strained the top lacing and you could see a great pack of muscle shifting when his shoulder moved under his thin coat. It was a body capable of enormous leverage formed and molded from training and missions that he rarely seemed to fail—a cruel body.  
His speaking voice, a gruff husky tenor, added to the impression of fractiousness he conveyed. There was a touch of paternal contempt in it, even toward people he liked—and there were men at UA who had hated his guts.  
“Now, don’t think my opinion on these matters is final,”he seemed to say, “just because I’m stronger and more of a man than you are.” We were in the same agency as sidekicks for a while, and while we were never intimate I always had the impression that he approved of me and wanted me to like him with some harsh, defiant wistfulness of his own. His father was so cruel and he looked so much like him. From what I knew of Endeavor and his abusive, it was almost tragic that Shoto had been unable to escape the circular nature of abuse. Something about having no limits to his wealth seemed to change him the older he got—the more inheritance he gained.  
We talked for a few minutes on the sunny porch.  
“I’ve got a nice place here,” he said, his eyes flashing about restlessly.  
Turning me around by one arm he moved a broad flat hand along the front vista, including in its sweep a sunken Italian garden, a half acre of deep pungent roses and a snub-nosed motor boat that bumped the tide offshore.  
“It belonged to All Might the oil man.” He turned me around again, politely and abruptly. “We’ll go inside.” He spoke clearly with no specific tone.  
We walked through a high hallway into a bright rosy colored space, fragilely bound into the house by French windows at either end. The windows were ajar and gleaming white against the fresh grass outside that seemed to grow a little way into the house. A breeze blew through the room, blew curtains in at one end and out the other like pale flags, twisting them up toward the frosted wedding cake of the ceiling—and then rippled over the wine-colored rug, making a shadow on it as wind does on the sea.  
The only completely stationary object in the room was an enormous couch on which two young women were buoyed up as though upon an anchored balloon. They were both in white and their dresses were rippling and fluttering as if they had just been blown back in after a short flight around the house. I must have stood for a few moments listening to the whip and snap of the curtains and the groan of a picture on the wall. Then there was a boom as Shoto Todoroki shut the rear windows and the caught wind died out about the room and the curtains and the rugs and the two young women ballooned slowly to the floor.  
The younger of the two was a stranger to me. She was extended full length at her end of the divan, completely motionless and with her chin raised a little as if she were balancing something on it which was quite likely to fall. If she saw me out of the corner of her eyes she gave no hint of it—indeed, I was almost surprised into murmuring an apology for having disturbed her by coming in.  
The other girl, Ochako Uraraka, sorry Ochako Todoroki, made an attempt to rise—she leaned slightly forward with a conscientious expression— then she laughed, an aloof, charming little laugh, and I laughed too and came forward into the room.  
‘I’m f-floating with happiness.’  
She laughed again, as if she said something very witty, and held my hand for a moment, looking up into my face, promising that there was no one in the world she so much wanted to see. That was a way she had. She hinted in a murmur that the surname of the balancing girl was Ashido. (I’ve heard it said that Ochako’s murmur was only to make people lean toward her; an irrelevant criticism that made it no less charming.)  
At any rate Miss Ashido’s lips fluttered, she nodded at me almost imperceptibly and then quickly tipped her head back again—the object she was balancing had obviously tottered a little and given her something of a fright. Again a sort of. apology arose to my lips. Almost any exhibition of complete self sufficiency draws a stunned tribute from me.  
I looked back at my friend who began to ask me questions in her low, thrilling voice. It was the kind of voice that the ear follows up and down as if each speech is an arrangement of notes that will never be played again. A floating voice that lifts you into the air and gently places you near the beautiful mouth of the mother. Her face was sad and lovely with bright things in it, bright eyes and a bright passionate mouth—but there was an excitement in her voice that men who had cared for her found difficult to forget: a singing compulsion, a whispered ‘Listen,’ a promise that she had done gay, exciting things just a while since and that there were gay, exciting things hovering in the next hour.  
I told her how I had stopped off in Tokyo for a day on my way east and how a dozen people had sent their love through me.  
‘Do they miss me?’ she cried ecstatically.  
‘The whole town is desolate. All the cars have the left rear wheel painted black as a mourning wreath and there’s a persistent wail all night along the North Shore.’  
‘How gorgeous! Let’s go back, Sho. Tomorrow!’ Then she added irrelevantly, ‘You ought to see the baby.’  
‘I’d like to.’  
‘She’s asleep. She’s two years old. Haven’t you ever seen her?’  
‘Never.’  
‘Well, you ought to see her. She’s——‘  
Shoto Todoroki who had been hovering restlessly about  
the room stopped and rested his hand on my shoulder.  
“What you doing, Eijiro?”  
‘I’m in hero management.’  
‘Who with?’  
I told him.  
‘Never heard of them,’ he remarked decisively.  
This annoyed me.  
‘You will,’ I answered shortly. ‘You will if you stay in the  
East.’  
‘Oh, I’ll stay in the East, don’t you worry,’ he said, glancing at Ochako and then back at me, as if he were alert for something more. ‘I’d be a Damned fool to live anywhere else.’  
At this point Miss Ashido said ‘Absolutely!’ with such suddenness that I started—it was the first word she uttered since I came into the room. Evidently it surprised her as much as it did me, for she yawned and with a series of rapid, deft movements stood up into the room.  
‘I’m stiff,’ she complained, ‘I’ve been lying on that sofa for as long as I can remember.’  
‘Don’t look at me,’ Ochako retorted. ‘I’ve been trying to get you into the city all afternoon.’  
‘No, thanks,’ said Miss Ashido to the four cocktails just in from the pantry, ‘I’m absolutely in training.’  
Her host looked at her incredulously.  
‘You are!’ He took down his drink as if it were a drop in the bottom of a glass. ‘How you ever get anything done is beyond me.’  
I looked at Miss Ashido wondering what it was she ‘got done.’ I enjoyed looking at her. She was a short pink girl with broad hips and thick shoulder muscles that she accentuated by throwing her body backward at the shoulders like a young cadet. Her black eyes looked back at me with polite reciprocal curiosity out of a wan, charming discontented face. A glint of honey in her iris caught me off guard. It occurred to me now that I had seen her, or a picture of her, somewhere before.  
‘You live in West Egg,’ she remarked contemptuously. ‘I know somebody there.’  
‘I don’t know a single——‘  
‘You must know Bakugo.’  
‘Bakugo?’ demanded Daisy. ‘What Bakugo?’  
Before I could reply that he was my neighbor dinner was announced; wedging his tense arm imperatively under mine Shoto Todoroki compelled me from the room as though he were moving a checker to another square.  
Slenderly, languidly, their hands set lightly on their hips the two young women preceded us out onto a rosy-colored porch open toward the sunset where four candles flickered on the table in the diminished wind.  
‘Why CANDLES?’ objected Ochako, frowning. She snapped them out with her fingers. ‘In two weeks it’ll be the longest day in the year.’ She looked at us all radiantly. ‘Do you always watch for the longest day of the year and then miss it? I always watch for the longest day in the year and then miss it.’  
‘We ought to plan something,’ yawned Miss Ashido, sitting down at the table as if she were getting into bed.  
‘All right,’ said Ochako. ‘What’ll we plan?’ She turned to me helplessly. ‘What do people plan?’  
Before I could answer her eyes fastened with an awed ex- pression on her little finger.  
‘Look!’ she complained. ‘I hurt it.’  
We all looked—the knuckle was black and blue.  
‘You did it, Sho,’ she said accusingly. ‘I know you didn’t  
mean to but you DID do it. That’s what I get for marrying a brute of a man, a great big hulking physical specimen of a——‘  
‘I hate that word hulking,’ objected Shoto crossly, ‘even in kidding.’  
‘Hulking,’ insisted Daisy. The men in the Todoroki family were all hulking. Endeavor was quite often described as such.  
Sometimes she and Miss Ashido talked at once, unobtrusively and with a bantering inconsequence that was never quite chatter, that was as cool as their white dresses and their impersonal eyes in the absence of all desire. They were here—and they accepted Shoto and me, making only a polite pleasant effort to entertain or to be entertained. They knew that presently dinner would be over and a little later the evening too would be over and casually put away. It was sharply different from the West where an evening was hurried from phase to phase toward its close in a continually disappointed anticipation or else in sheer nervous dread of the moment itself.  
‘You make me feel uncivilized, Ochako,’ I confessed on my second glass of corky but rather impressive claret. ‘Can’t you talk about crops or something?’  
I meant nothing in particular by this remark but it was taken up in an unexpected way.  
‘Civilization’s going to pieces,’ broke out Shoto violently.  
‘I’ve gotten to be a terrible pessimist about things. Have you read that one book about the Paranormal Liberation Front and the Rise of Villainy as a common practice?”  
‘Why, no,’ I answered, rather surprised by his tone.  
‘Well, it’s a fine book, and everybody ought to read it. The idea is if we don’t look out the heroes will be utterly powerless.’  
‘Sho’s getting very profound,’ said Ochako with an expression of unthoughtful sadness. ‘He reads deep books with long words in them. What was that word we——‘  
‘Well, these books are all scientific,’ insisted Shoto with his usual monotone timbre, glancing at her impatiently. ‘This fellow has worked out the whole thing. It’s up to us who are the retired heroes to watch out for the younger generation to make sure they are not tempted by the way of the villains.’  
‘We’ve got to beat them down,’ whispered Daisy, wink- ing ferociously toward the fervent sun.  
‘You ought to live in California—’ began Miss Ashido but Shoto interrupted her by shifting heavily in his chair.  
‘This idea is that we’re heroes. I am, and you are and you are and——’ After an infinitesimal hesitation he included Ochako with a slight nod and she winked at me again. ‘—and we’ve saved all the things that go to make civilization—oh, science and art and all that. Do you see?’  
There was something pathetic in his concentration as if his complacency, more acute than of old, was not enough to him any more. When, almost immediately, the telephone rang inside and the butler left the porch Ochako seized upon the momentary interruption and leaned toward me.  
‘I’ll tell you a family secret,’ she whispered enthusiastically. ‘It’s about the butler’s nose. Do you want to hear about the butler’s nose?’  
‘That’s why I came over tonight.’  
‘Well, he wasn’t always a butler; he used to be the silver polisher for some people in New York that had a silver service for two hundred people. He had to polish it from morning till night until finally it began to affect his nose— —‘  
‘Things went from bad to worse,’ suggested Miss Ashido.  
‘Yes. Things went from bad to worse until finally he had to give up his position.’  
For a moment the last sunshine fell with romantic affection upon her glowing face; her voice compelled me forward breathlessly as I listened—then the glow faded, each light deserting her with lingering regret like children leaving a pleasant street at dusk.  
The butler came back and murmured something close to Shoto’s ear whereupon Shoto frowned, pushed back his chair and without a word went inside. As if his absence quickened something within her Ochako leaned forward again, her voice glowing and singing.  
‘I love to see you at my table, Eijiro. You remind me of a— of a white rose, an absolute rose. Doesn’t he?’ She turned to Miss Ashido for confirmation. ‘An absolute rose?’  
This was untrue. I am not even faintly like a rose. She was only extemporizing but a stirring warmth flowed from her as if her heart was trying to come out to you concealed in one of those breathless, thrilling words. Then suddenly she threw her napkin on the table and excused herself and went into the house.  
Miss Ashido and I exchanged a short glance consciously devoid of meaning. I was about to speak when she sat up alertly and said ‘Sh!’ in a warning voice. A subdued impassioned murmur was audible in the room beyond and Miss Ashido leaned forward, unashamed, trying to hear. The murmur trembled on the verge of coherence, sank down, mounted excitedly, and then ceased altogether.  
‘This Mr. Bakugo you spoke of is my neighbor——’ I said.  
‘Don’t talk. I want to hear what happens.’  
‘Is something happening?’ I inquired innocently.  
‘You mean to say you don’t know?’ said Miss Ashido, honestly surprised. ‘I thought everybody knew.’  
‘I don’t.’  
‘Why——’ she said hesitantly, ‘Shoto’s got some low profile hero friendin New York.’  
‘Got some woman?’ I repeated blankly.  
Miss Ashido shook her head.  
‘Not a woman, but yes a mistress. He might have the decency not to telephone him at dinner-time. Don’t you think?’  
Almost before I had grasped her meaning there was the flutter of a dress and the crunch of leather boots and Shoto and Ochako were back at the table.  
‘It couldn’t be helped!’ cried Ochako with tense gayety.  
She sat down, glanced searchingly at Miss Ashido and then at me and continued: ‘I looked outdoors for a minute and it’s very romantic outdoors. There’s a bird on the lawn that I think must be a nightingale come over on the Cunard or White Star Line. He’s singing away——’ her voice sang ‘——It’s romantic, isn’t it, Sho?’  
‘Very romantic,’ he said, and then miserably to me: ‘If it’s light enough after dinner I want to take you down to the stables.’  
The telephone rang inside, startlingly, and as Ochako shook her head decisively at Shoto the subject of the stables, in fact all subjects, vanished into air. Among the broken fragments of the last five minutes at table I remember the candles being lit again, pointlessly, and I was conscious of wanting to look squarely at every one and yet to avoid all eyes. I couldn’t guess what Ochako and Shoto were thinking but I doubt if even Miss Ashido who seemed to have mastered a certain hardy skepticism was able to put this fifth guest’s shrill metallic urgency out of mind. To a certain temperament the situation might have seemed intriguing—my own instinct was to telephone immediately for the police.  
The horses, needless to say, were not mentioned again. Shoto and Miss Ashido, with several feet of twilight between them strolled back into the library, as if to a vigil beside a perfectly tangible body, while trying to look pleasantly interested and a little deaf I followed Ochako around a chain of connecting verandas to the porch in front. In its deep gloom we sat down side by side on a wicker settee.  
Ochako took her face in her hands, as if feeling its lovely round shape, and her eyes moved gradually out into the velvet dusk. I saw that turbulent emotions possessed her, so I asked what I thought would be some sedative questions about her little girl.  
‘We don’t know each other very well anymore, Nick,’ she said suddenly. ‘Even if we are schoolmates. You didn’t come to my wedding.’  
‘I wasn’t out of physical rehabilitation from my injuries from the fight.’  
‘That’s true.’ She hesitated. ‘Well, I’ve had a very bad time, Ei, and I’m pretty cynical about everything.’  
Evidently she had reason to be. I waited but she didn’t say any more, and after a moment I returned rather feebly to the subject of her daughter.  
‘I suppose she talks, and—eats, and everything.’  
‘Oh, yes.’ She looked at me absently. ‘Listen, Eijiro; let me tell you what I said when she was born. Would you like to hear?’  
‘Very much.’  
‘It’ll show you how I’ve gotten to feel about—things. Well, she was less than an hour old and Shoto was God knows where. I woke up out of the ether with an utterly abandoned feeling and asked the nurse right away if it was a boy or a girl. She told me it was a girl, and so I turned my head away and wept. ‘All right,’ I said, ‘I’m glad it’s a girl. And I hope she’ll be a fool—that’s the best thing a girl can be in this world, a beautiful little fool.’  
Ochako was not a fool. At least I had never thought her to be, but she gave up hero work to be Shoto’s perfect wife and mother to another perfect child.  
‘You see I think everything’s terrible anyhow,’ she went on in a convinced way. ‘Everybody thinks so—the most advanced people. And I KNOW. I’ve been everywhere and seen everything and done everything.’ Her eyes flashed around her in a defiant way, rather like Shoto’s, and she laughed with thrilling scorn. ‘Sophisticated—God, I’m sophisticated!’  
The instant her voice broke off, ceasing to compel my attention, my belief, I felt the basic insincerity of what she had said. It made me uneasy, as though the whole evening had been a trick of some sort to exact a contributory emotion from me. I waited, and sure enough, in a moment she looked at me with an absolute smirk on her lovely face as if she had asserted her membership in a rather distinguished secret society to which she and Shoto belonged.  
Inside, the crimson room bloomed with light. Shoto and Miss Ashido sat at either end of the long couch and she read aloud to him from the ‘Saturday Evening Post’—the words, murmurous and uninflected, running together in a sooth- ing tune. The lamp-light, bright on his boots and dull on the sunset pink of her hair, glinted along the paper as she turned a page with a flutter of slender muscles in her arms.  
When we came in she held us silent for a moment with a lifted hand.  
‘To be continued,’ she said, tossing the magazine on the table, ‘in our very next issue.’  
Her body asserted itself with a restless movement of her knee, and she stood up.  
‘Ten o’clock,’ she remarked, apparently finding the time on the ceiling. ‘Time for this good girl to go to bed.’  
‘Mina’s going to have a press mission tomorrow,’ explained Ochako.  
‘Oh,—you’re Mina Ashido.’  
I knew now why her face was familiar—its pleasing contemptuous expression had looked out at me from many rotogravure pictures of the celebrity hero life in the city. I had heard some story of her too, a critical, unpleasant story, but what it was I had forgotten long ago.  
‘Good night,’ she said softly. ‘Wake me at eight, won’t you.’  
‘If you’ll get up.’  
‘I will. Good night, Mr. Kirishima. See you anon.’  
‘Of course you will,’ confirmed Ochako. ‘In fact I think  
I’ll arrange a marriage. Come over often, Eijiro, and I’ll sort of—oh—fling you together. You know—lock you up accidentally in linen closets and push you out to sea in a boat, and all that sort of thing——‘  
‘Good night,’ called Miss Ashido from the stairs. ‘I haven’t heard a word.’  
‘She’s a nice girl,’ said Shoto after a moment. ‘They oughtn’t to let her run around the country this way.’  
‘Who oughtn’t to?’ inquired Ochako coldly.  
‘Her family.’  
‘Her family is one aunt about a thousand years old. Besides, Eijiro’s going to look after her, aren’t you, EI? She’s going to spend lots of week-ends out here this summer. I think the home influence will be very good for her.’  
Ochako and Shoto looked at each other for a moment in silence.  
‘Is she from here?’ I asked quickly.  
‘No, she went to a sister school. Our white girlhood was passed together there. Our beautiful white, well pink——‘  
‘Did you give Eijiro a little heart to heart talk on the veranda?’ demanded Shoto suddenly.  
‘Did I?’ She looked at me. ‘I can’t seem to remember, but I think we talked about hero society. Yes, I’m sure we did. It sort of crept up on us and first thing you know——‘  
‘Don’t believe everything you hear, Kirishima,’ he advised me.  
I said lightly that I had heard nothing at all, and a few minutes later I got up to go home. They came to the door with me and stood side by side in a cheerful square of light. As I started my motor Ochako peremptorily called ‘Wait!  
‘I forgot to ask you something, and it’s important. We heard you were engaged to a girl out West.’  
‘That’s right,’ corroborated Shoto kindly. ‘We heard that you were engaged.’  
‘It’s libel. I’m too poor.’  
‘But we heard it,’ insisted Ochako, surprising me by opening up again in a flower-like way. ‘We heard it from three people so it must be true.’  
Of course I knew what they were referring to, but I wasn’t even vaguely engaged. The fact that gossip had been published so frequently was one of the reasons I had come east. You can’t stop going with an old friend on account of rumors and on the other hand I had no intention of being rumored into marriage. Especially not with someone so feminine.  
Their interest rather touched me and made them less remotely rich—nevertheless, I was confused and a little disgusted as I drove away. It seemed to me that the thing for Ochako to do was to rush out of the house, child in arms—but apparently there were no such intentions in her head. As for Shoto, the fact that he ‘had some man in New York’ wasreally less surprising than that he had been depressed by a book. Something was making him nibble at the edge of stale ideas as if his sturdy physical egotism no longer nourished his peremptory heart.  
Already it was deep summer on roadhouse roofs and in front of wayside garages, where new red gas-pumps sat out in pools of light, and when I reached my estate at West Egg I ran the car under its shed and sat for a while on an abandoned grass roller in the yard. The wind had blown off, leaving a loud bright night with wings beating in the trees and a persistent organ sound as the full bellows of the earth blew the frogs full of life. The silhouette of a moving cat wavered across the moonlight and turning my head to watch it I saw that I was not alone—fifty feet away a figure had emerged from the shadow of my neighbor’s mansion and was standing with his hands in his pockets regarding the silver pepper of the stars. Something in his leisurely move- ments and the secure position of his feet upon the lawn suggested that it was Mr. Bakugo himself, come out to determine what share was his of our local heavens.  
I decided to call to him. Miss Ashido had mentioned him at dinner, and that would do for an introduction. But I didn’t call to him for he gave a sudden intimation that he was content to be alone—he stretched out his arms toward the dark water in a curious way, and far as I was from him I could have sworn he was trembling. Involuntarily I glanced seaward—and distinguished nothing except a single green light, minute and far away, that might have been the end of a dock. When I looked once more for Bakugo he had vanished, and I was alone again in the unquiet darkness.


	2. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Kirishima meets our Myrtle, Midoriya, a quirkless man married to the retired hero Iida. I know this seems a bit out of character, but give it a minute. I’m trying to fit the story into a hero world while still making it as gay because Fitzgerald was a coward.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Again. The Great Gatsby is written by F. Scott Fitzgerald. This is just a slightly reworked version

About half way between West Egg and New York the motor-road hastily joins the railway and runs beside it for a quarter of a mile, so as to shrink away from a certain desolate area of land. This is a valley of ashes—a fantastic farm where ashes grow like wheat into ridges and hills and grotesque gardens where ashes take the forms of houses and chimneys and rising smoke and finally, with a transcendent effort, of men who move dimly and already crumbling through the powdery air. Occasionally a line of grey cars crawls along an invisible track, gives out a ghastly creak and comes to rest, and immediately the mutant men swarm up with leaden spades and stir up an impenetrable cloud which screens their obscure operations from your sight.  
But above the grey land and the spasms of bleak dust which drift endlessly over it, you perceive, after a moment, the piercing eyes of K.T. Hawks. The eyes of K.T. Hawks are gold and gigantic—their retinas are one yard high. They look out of no face but, instead, from a pair of enormous yellow goggles which pass over a nonexistent nose. Evidently some commission lacky set them there to get more visibility for their star hero, but after a spectacular failure Hawks fell into obscurity and the sign remained there eagle eyed over the town. But his eyes, dimmed a little by many paintless days under sun and rain, brood on over the solemn dumping ground.  
The valley of ashes is bounded on one side by a small foul river, and when the drawbridge is up to let barges through, the passengers on waiting trains can stare at the dismal scene for as long as half an hour. There is always a halt there of at least a minute and it was because of this that I first met Shoto Todoroki’s mistress. Is mistress the correct word for a man?  
The fact that he was having an affair was insisted upon wherever he was known. His acquaintances resented the fact that he turned up in popular restaurants with him and, leaving him at a table, sauntered about, chatting with whomsoever he knew. Though I was curious to see him I had no desire to meet him—but I did. I went up to New York with Shoto on the train one afternoon and when we stopped by the ashheaps he jumped to his feet and taking hold of my elbow literally forced me from the car.  
‘We’re getting off!’ he insisted. ‘I want you to meet my love.’  
I think he’d tanked up a good deal at luncheon and his determination to have my company bordered on violence. The supercilious assumption was that on Sunday afternoon I had nothing better to do. I didn’t.   
I followed him over a low white-washed railroad fence and we walked back a hundred yards along the road under Hawks’ persistent stare. The only building in sight was a small block of yellow brick sitting on the edge of the waste land, a sort of compact Main Street ministering to it and contiguous to absolutely nothing. One of the three shops it contained was for rent and another was an all-night restaurant approached by a trail of ashes; the third was a garage—Repairs. TENYA IIDA. Cars Bought and Sold—and I followed Shoto inside.  
The interior was unprosperous and bare; the only car visible was the dust-covered wreck of a Ford which crouched in a dim corner. It had occurred to me that this shadow of a garage must be a blind and that sumptuous and romantic apartments were concealed overhead when the proprietor himself appeared in the door of an office, wiping his hands on a piece of waste. He was a dark haired, spiritless man, anaemic, and faintly handsome. When he saw us a damp gleam of hope sprang into his dark pointed eyes.  
‘Hello, Iida, old man,’ said Shoto, slapping him jovially on the shoulder. ‘How’s business?’  
‘I can’t complain,’ answered Iida unconvincingly. ‘When are you going to sell me that car?’  
‘Next week; I’ve got my man working on it now.’  
‘Works pretty slow, don’t he?’  
‘No, he doesn’t,’ said Shoto coldly. ‘And if you feel that way  
about it, maybe I’d better sell it somewhere else after all.’  
‘I don’t mean that,’ explained Iida quickly. ‘I just  
meant——‘  
His voice faded off and Shoto glanced impatiently around  
the garage. Then I heard footsteps on a stairs and in a moment the thickish figure of a man blocked out the light from the office door. He must have been in the middle thirties and short. He carried muscles on broad shoulders that made him look quite tall however standing next to Shoto it was clear he was not. His face, above a green button up shirt contained big bright green eyes and freckles that danced across his face gracefully. There was an immediately perceptible vitality about him as if the nerves of his body were continually smouldering with electricity. He smiled slowly and walking through his husband as if he were a ghost shook hands with Shoto, looking him flush in the eye. Then he wet his lips and without turning around spoke to his husband in a soft, coarse voice:  
‘Get some chairs, why don’t you, so somebody can sit down.’  
‘Oh, sure,’ agreed Iida hurriedly and went toward the little office, mingling immediately with the cement color of the walls. A white ashen dust veiled his dark suit and his dark hair as it veiled everything in the vicinity—except his husband, who moved close to Shoto.  
‘I want to see you,’ said Shoto intently. ‘Get on the next train.’  
‘All right.’  
‘I’ll meet you by the news-stand on the lower level.’  
He nodded and moved away from him just as Tenya Iida emerged with two chairs from his office door.  
“I’m Izuku Midoriya.”  
“Iida”. Tenya responded.  
‘Midoriya here was almost a hero.’ Shoto said, ignoring Tenya rubbing the maiden name in his face. We left the garage shortly after   
We waited for him down the road and out of sight. It was a few days before the Fourth of July, and a grey, scrawny Italian child was setting torpedoes from his elbow in a row along the railroad track.  
‘Terrible place, isn’t it,’ said Shoto, exchanging a frown  
with K.T. Hawks. ‘Awful.’  
‘It does him good to get away.’  
‘Doesn’t his husband object?’  
“Iida? He thinks He goes to see His mom in the city. He’s so dumb he doesn’t know he’s alive. Didn’t used to be that way though’ Shoto murmured sadly as if remembering a childhood adventure.  
So Shoto and his boy and I went up together into town—or not quite together, for Midoriya, sat discreetly in another car. Shoto deferred that much to the sensibilities of those East Eggers who might be on the train.  
He had changed his outfit into a tight fitting grey suit that was stretched tight over broad shoulders. He held Shoto’s hand as they left the train. At the news-stand she bought a copy of ‘Town Tattle’ and a hero magazine and, in the station drug store, some beverages and a small flask of perfume. Upstairs, in the solemn echoing drive he let four taxi cabs drive away before he selected a new one, lavender-colored with grey upholstery, and in this we slid out from the mass of the station into the glowing sunshine. But immediately he turned sharply from the window and leaning forward tapped on the front glass.  
‘I want to get one of those dogs,’ he said earnestly. ‘I want to get one for the apartment. They’re nice to have—a dog.’  
We backed up to a grey old man who bore an absurd resemblance to Gran Torino. In a basket, swung from his neck, cowered a dozen very recent puppies of an indeterminate breed.  
‘What kind are they?’ asked Midoriya eagerly as he came to the taxi-window.  
‘All kinds. What kind do you want, sir?’  
‘I’d like to get one of those big yellow labs; I don’t suppose you got that kind? They remind me of All Might’ he smiled.  
The man peered doubtfully into the basket, plunged in his hand and drew one up, wriggling, by the back of the neck.  
‘That’s no Labrador,’ said Shoto.  
‘No, it’s not exactly a lab,’ said the man with disappointment in his voice. ‘It’s more of a retriever.’ He passed his hand over the brown wash-rag of a back. ‘Look at that coat. Some coat. That’s a dog that’ll never bother you with catching cold.’  
‘I think it’s cute,’ said Midoriya enthusiastically. ‘How much is it?’  
‘That dog?’ He looked at it admiringly. ‘That dog will cost you forty dollars.’  
The retriever—undoubtedly there was an retriever concerned in it somewhere though its feet were startlingly white—changed hands and settled down into Midoriya’s lap, where he fondled the weather-proof coat with rapture.  
‘Is it a boy or a girl?’ He asked delicately.  
‘That dog? That dog’s a boy.’  
‘It’s a bitch,’ said Shoto decisively. ‘Here’s your money. Go and buy ten more dogs with it.’ We drove over to Fifth Avenue, so warm and soft, almost pastoral, on the summer Sunday afternoon that I wouldn’t have been surprised to see a great flock of white sheep turn the corner.  
‘Hold on,’ I said, ‘I have to leave you here.’  
‘No, you don’t,’ interposed Shoto quickly. ‘Izuku’ll be hurt if you don’t come up to the apartment. Won’t you, Izuku?’  
‘Come on,’ he urged. ‘I’ll telephone my friend Momo. She’s said to be very beautiful by people who ought to know.’  
‘Well, I’d like to, but——‘  
We went on, cutting back again over the Park toward the West Hundreds. At 158th Street the cab stopped at one slice in a long white cake of apartment houses. Throwing a regal homecoming glance around the neighborhood, Midoriya gathered up his dog and his other purchases and went haughtily in.  
‘I’m going to have the Kaminaris come up,’ he announced as we rose in the elevator. ‘And of course I got to call up Momo, too.’  
The apartment was on the top floor—a small living room, a small dining room, a small bedroom and a bath. The living room was crowded to the doors with a set of tap- estried furniture entirely too large for it so that to move about was to stumble continually over scenes of ladies swinging in the gardens of Versailles. The only picture was an over-enlarged photograph, apparently a hen sitting on a blurred rock. Looked at from a distance however the hen resolved itself into a bonnet and the countenance of a stout old lady beamed down into the room. Several old copies of ‘Town Tattle ‘lay on the table together with a copy of ‘Simon Called Peter’ and some of the small scandal magazines about Tokyo’s elite. Midoriya was first concerned with the dog. A reluctant elevator boy went for a box full of straw and some milk to which he added on his own initiative a tin of large hard dog biscuits—one of which decomposed apathetically in the saucer of milk all afternoon. Meanwhile Shoto brought out a bottle of whiskey from a locked bureau door.  
I have been drunk just twice in my life and the second time was that afternoon so everything that happened has a dim hazy cast over it although until after eight o’clock the apartment was full of cheerful sun. Sitting on Shoto’s lap Midoriya called up several people on the telephone; then there were no cigarettes and I went out to buy some at the drug store on the corner. When I came back they had disappeared so I sat down discreetly in the living room and read a chapter of ‘Simon Called Peter’—either it was terrible stuff or the whiskey distorted things because it didn’t make any sense to me.  
Just as Shoto and Izuku—after the first drink Mrs. Midoriya and I called each other by our first names—reappeared, company commenced to arrive at the apartment door.  
The friend, Momo, was a slender, worldly girl of about thirty with a solid long ponytail and a complexion powdered milky white. Her eyebrows had been plucked and then drawn on again at a more rakish angle but the efforts of nature toward the restoration of the old alignment gave a haughty air to her face. When she moved about there was an incessant clicking as innumerable pottery bracelets jin- gled up and down upon her arms. She came in with such a proprietary haste and looked around so possessively at the furniture that I wondered if she lived here. But when I asked her she laughed immoderately, repeated my question aloud and told me she lived with a girl friend at a hotel.  
Denki Kaminari was a blonde feminine man from the flat below. He had just shaved for there was a white spot of lather on his cheekbone and he was most respectful in his greeting to everyone in the room. He informed me that he was in the hero business as well in this area and I gathered later that he was quite far down on the rankings, but was extremely successful on the missions he did take. His wife was shrill, languid, handsome and bold. She told me with randomly pride that her husband had photographed her a hundred and twenty-seven times since they had been married. Izuku had changed his costume some time before and was now attired in an elaborate toned down recreation of his own idea of a hero costume which gave out a continual rustle as he swept about the room. With the influence of the suit his personality had also undergone a change. The intense vitality that had been so remarkable in the garage was converted into impressive hauteur. His laughter, his gestures, his assertions became more violently affected moment by moment and as he expanded the room grew smaller around him until he seemed to be revolving on a noisy, creaking pivot through the smoky air.  
‘My dear,’ he told his friend is an awkward shout, ‘most of these fellas will cheat you every time. All they think of is money. I had a woman up here last week to look at my arms and when she gave me the bill you’d of thought she had my appendicitus out.’  
‘What was the name of the woman?’ asked Mrs. McKee.  
‘Mrs. Eberhardt. She goes around looking at people’s arms in their own homes.’  
‘I like your suit,’ remarked Jirou Kaminari, ‘I think it’s adorable.’  
Izuku rejected the compliment by raising his eyebrow in disdain.  
‘It’s just a crazy old thing,’ he said. ‘I just slip it on sometimes when I don’t care what I look like.’  
‘But it looks wonderful on you, if you know what I mean,’ pursued Mrs. Kaminari. ‘If Denki could only get you in that pose I think he could make something of it.’  
I looked at a few of Kaminari’s photographs and they were less than professional and yet Jirou kept bringing his hobby up. We all looked in silence at Midoriya who removed a strand of green hair from over her eyes and looked back at us with a brilliant smile. Mr. Kaminari regarded him intently with his head on one side and then moved his hand back and forth slowly in front of his face.  
‘I should change the light,’ he said after a moment. ‘I’d like to bring out the modelling of the features. And I’d try to get hold of all the back hair.’  
‘I wouldn’t think of changing the light,’ cried Mrs. Kaminari. ‘I think it’s——‘  
Her husband said ‘SH!’ and we all looked at the subject again whereupon Shoto Todoroki yawned audibly and got to his feet.  
‘You Kaminaris have something to drink,’ he said. ‘Get some more ice and mineral water, Izuku, before everybody goes to sleep.’  
‘I told that boy about the ice.’ Izuku raised his eyebrows in despair at the shiftlessness of the lower orders. ‘These people! You have to keep after them all the time.’  
He looked at me and laughed pointlessly. Then he flounced over to the dog, kissed it with ecstasy and swept into the kitchen, implying that a dozen chefs awaited his orders there.  
‘I’ve done some nice things out in town. Some good missions.” Proclaimed Denki.  
Shoto looked at him blankly.  
‘Two of them we have framed downstairs.’  
‘Two what?’ demanded Tom.  
‘Two mission reports. Do you not have your biggest saves framed?”   
The friend Momo sat down beside me on the couch. ‘Do you live across the sound too’ she inquired.  
‘I live at West Egg.’  
‘Really? I was down there at a party about a month ago. At a man named Bakugo’s. Do you know him?’  
‘I live next door to him.’  
‘Well, they say he’s a nephew or a cousin of Nana Shimura’s. That’s where all his money comes from.’  
‘Really?’  
She nodded.  
‘I’m scared of him. I’d hate to have him get anything on me.’  
This absorbing information about my neighbor was interrupted by Mrs. Kaminari’s pointing suddenly at Momo: ‘Denki, I think you could do something with HER,’ she broke out, but Mr. Kaminari only nodded in a bored way and turned his attention to Shoto.  
‘I’d like to do more team ups in the city. All I ask is that you introduce me to some of the higher ranked heroes. Kirishima here is wonderful, but we all know he retired.’  
‘Ask Izuku,’ said Shoto, breaking into a short shout of laughter as Midoriya entered with a tray. ‘He’ll give you a letter of introduction, won’t you, Izuku?’  
‘Do what?’ he asked, startled.  
‘You’ll give Kaminari a letter of introduction to your husband, so he can do some team ups with him.’ His lips moved silently for a moment as he invented.   
‘Tenya Iida. He is also retired, but I’m sure he’s itching to be a hero again. What rank was he? 99?’  
Momo leaned close to me and whispered in my ear with a drunk velvet tone: ‘Neither of them can stand the person they’re married to.’  
‘Can’t they?’  
‘Can’t STAND them.’ She looked at Izuku and then at Shoto. ‘What I say is, why go on living with them if they can’t stand them? If I was them I’d get a divorce and get married to each other right away. Sure being gay is more difficult, but if the rest of us can do it’  
‘The hero world is not that simple’  
‘I know. I know. It’s rumored that it’s why his husband had to retire in the first place.’  
‘Doesn’t he like Iida either?’  
The answer to this was unexpected. It came from Izuku who had overheard the question and it was violent and obscene.  
‘You see?’ cried Momo triumphantly. She lowered her voice again. ‘It’s really his wife that’s keeping them apart. She’s a Catholic and they don’t believe in divorce.’  
Ochako was not a Catholic and I was a little shocked at the elaborateness of the lie.  
‘When they do get married,’ continued Momo, ‘they’re going east to live for a while until it blows over.’  
‘It’d be more discreet to go to Europe.’  
‘Oh, do you like Europe?’ she exclaimed surprisingly. ‘I just got back from Monte Carlo.’  
‘Really.’  
‘Just last year. I went over there with another girl.’  
‘Stay long?’  
‘No, we just went to Monte Carlo and back. We went by way of Marseilles. We had over twelve hundred dollars when we started but we got gypped out of it all in two days in the private rooms. We had an awful time getting back, I can tell you. God, how I hated that town!’  
The late afternoon sky bloomed in the window for a moment like the blue honey of the Mediterranean—then the shrill voice of Jirou called me back into the room.  
‘I almost made a mistake, too,’ she declared vigorously. ‘I almost married a little specialist who’d been after me for years. I knew he was below me. Everybody kept saying to me: ‘Jirou, that man’s way below you!’ But if I hadn’t met Denki, he’d of got me sure.’  
‘Yes, but listen,’ said Izuku Iida, nodding her head up and down, ‘at least you didn’t marry him.’  
‘I know I didn’t.’  
‘Well, I married him,’ said Izuku, ambiguously. ‘And that’s the difference between your case and mine.’  
‘Why did you, Zuzu?’ demanded Momo. ‘Nobody forced you to.’  
Izuku considered.  
‘I married him because I thought he was a gentle hero,’ he said finally. ‘I though he knew something about strength and power, but he wasn’t fit to lick even my quirkless shoe.’  
‘You were crazy about him for a while,’ said Momo.  
‘Crazy about him!’ Cried Midoriya incredulously. ‘Who said I was crazy about him? I never was any more crazy about him than I was about that man there.’  
She pointed suddenly at me, and every one looked at me accusingly. I tried to show by my expression that I had played no part in her past.  
‘The only CRAZY I was was when I married him. I knew right away I made a mistake. He borrowed somebody’s best suit to get married in and never even told me about it, and the man came after it one day when he was out.’  
He looked around to see who was listening: ‘ ‘Oh, is that your suit?’ I said. ‘This is the first I ever heard about it.’ But I gave it to him and then I lay down and cried to beat till he returned from that low stakes mission all afternoon.’  
‘He really ought to get away from him,’ resumed Momo to me. ‘They’ve been living over that garage for eleven years. And Shoto’s the first sweetie he ever had.’  
The bottle of whiskey—a second one—was now in constant demand by all present, excepting Momo who ‘felt just as good on nothing at all.’ Shoto rang for the janitor and sent him for some celebrated sandwiches, which were a complete supper in themselves. I wanted to get out and walk eastward toward the park through the soft twilight but each time I tried to go I became entangled in some wild strident argument which pulled me back, as if with ropes, into my chair. Yet high over the city our line of yellow windows must have contributed their share of human secrecy to the casual watcher in the darkening streets, and I was him too, looking up and wondering. I was within and without, simultaneously enchanted and repelled by the inexhaustible variety of life.  
Izuku pulled her chair close to mine, and suddenly his warm breath poured over me the story of her first meeting with Shoto.  
‘It was on the two little seats facing each other that are always the last ones left on the train. I was going up to New York to see my mom and spend the night. He had on a dress suit and patent leather shoes and I couldn’t keep my eyes off him but every time he looked at me I had to pretend to be looking at the advertisement over his head. When we came into the station he was next to me and his white shirt-front pressed against my arm—and so I told him I’d have to call a policeman, but he knew I lied. I was so excited that when I got into a taxi with him I didn’t hardly know I wasn’t getting into a subway train. All I kept thinking about, over and over, was ‘You can’t live forever, you can’t live forever.’ ‘  
He turned to Jirou and the room rang full of her artificial laughter. It was nine o’clock—almost immediately afterward I looked at my watch and found it was ten. Kaminari was asleep on a chair with his fists clenched in his lap, like a photograph of a man of action. Taking out my handkerchief I wiped from his cheek the remains of the spot of dried lather that had worried me all afternoon.  
The little dog was sitting on the table looking with blind eyes through the smoke and from time to time groaning faintly. People disappeared, reappeared, made plans to go somewhere, and then lost each other, searched for each other, found each other a few feet away. Some time toward midnight Shoto and Izuku stood face to face discussing in impassioned voices whether Izuku had any right to mention Daisy’s name.  
‘Ochako! Ochako! Ochako!’ Shouted Izuku. ‘I’ll say it whenever I want to! Ochako! Och——‘  
Making a short deft movement Shoto broke his nose with his open hand.  
Then there were bloody towels upon the bathroom floor, and women’s voices scolding, and high over the confusion a long deep broken wail of pain. Denki awoke from his doze and started in a daze toward the door. When he had gone half way he turned around and stared at the scene—his wife and Momo scolding and consoling as they stumbled here and there among the crowded furniture with articles of aid, and the despairing figure on the couch bleeding fluently and trying to spread a copy of ‘Town Tattle’ over the tapestry scenes of Versailles. Then Kaminari turned and continued on out the door. Taking my hat from the chandelier I followed.  
‘Come to lunch some day,’ he suggested, as we groaned down in the elevator.  
‘Where?’  
‘A n y w h e r e . ’ He flicked his eyes to the boy.  
‘Keep your hands off the lever,’ snapped the elevator  
boy.  
‘I beg your pardon,’ said Kaminari with dignity, ‘I didn’t  
know I was touching it.’  
‘All right,’ I agreed, ‘I’ll be glad to.’  
We entered the small flat drunk off our rears. He was nice. Jirou returned much later that night and piled onto the bed as well kissing my cheek softly like a friend. I fell asleep again with both of their heartbeats in sync with my own I think. I cannot always remember. I mentioned I had been drinking which was highly unusual.

…I was standing beside his bed and he was sitting up  
between the sheets, clad in his underwear, with a great portfolio in his hands. Missions.   
‘Camino Ward...Tatooine Station…Middle...Stain…’  
Then I was lying half asleep in the cold lower level of the Pennsylvania Station, staring at the morning ‘Tribune’ and waiting for the four o’clock train.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> That last paragraph existed as a time skip and I was always convinced it was because in the gap there way gay stuff going on so instead of pretending it didn’t, I wrote it anyway. See you soon.

**Author's Note:**

> I’m sorry. I’ll post again next week hopefully. Maybe sooner.


End file.
